Outloook's Mail Merge for Emailing

I use Windows 2000 and MS Outlook (2000 Sr-1) as my email client. Within MS Word i am using the mail merge feature to send out emails as part of a marketing campaign. Everything works fine but all my outgoing messages (i can review them in my outbox) are in text format. The form document i created has some graphics which are being lost. Example: a Word table is replaced by simple text thus screwing up the formatting, other pure graphics are deleted.

when i send the exact same document via email using Word's File/Send To email option it sends the doc exactly as it appears formatted in Word, graphics table and all.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated...